Between 2008 and 2010, a group of friends and I collected any blank cassette tape or answering machine tape we could find—swap shops at dumps across Cape Cod, yard sales, thrift stores, abandoned buildings, and even the basements of our parent’s houses. We would review the tapes and digitize anything interesting we found. We compiled about 50 recordings—ranging in length from a few seconds to several minutes, and in emotion from funny, to nonsensical, to sad. We dubbed ourselves and the project Found Sound Collective.

The idea that these were primarily unintentionally captured conversation snippets or messages that were never meant to be preserved is intriguing to me—a window into a moment we can never understand in the proper context, open to interpretation. At the time, I wasn’t aware of the deeper implications—I had not critically considered why we were doing this, it was just for the excitement of what we may find, the hunt itself, and to maybe have a source for samples in our music projects. It was just something to do, really.

Fast forward (cassette tape pun intended) to the present day wherein I have developed Messenger which utilizes these recordings to explore concepts of time, the index, non-narrative or non-storytelling, the archive, the database, and the broad concepts of ghosts and hauntings.

Messenger is a device for listening to ghosts. The stereo head unit from a 1981 Volvo 245 run by microcontrollers and FM transmitters, Messenger is an object from the past that opens a door, albeit the wrong one, to the ghosts of those who are immortalized in the answering machine tape recordings. Pulled from the flow of time to be held in perpetuity (unbeknownst to them) they are not ghosts strictly in the paranormal sense. I believe a ghost can also be an index, or inversely, that an index is a form of a ghost.